It’s rare that I end up with extra time to help out non-profits. But once in a great while one will come along that seems worthy of the extra energy it will cost me. The If Project is a organization that works with current/former incarcerated adults, and helps them to better their lives. I had actually heard about them years ago (through mutual friends), and when they recently needed a wordpress person to help fix their broken site, I jumped on it.

Once I went to meet them, and saw how enthusiastic they were and how much they truly believed in what they were doing, the more I wanted to help. Their website hadn’t been touched since 2008….. forget just fixing it, let’s make it better!

And that’s what we did. Sticking with the same look of their old theme (they liked the banner), I decided to modernize it. I widened it, enlarged the fonts a bit, added more white space, made it mobile friendly, helped them reorganize the content, cleaned up the backend so it’s easier to update… it almost feels like a whole new site. I’m in this for the long haul, it will just get better from here.

Sometimes my work isn’t creating a new site, but rather, re-creating a old one.

In this case, my client HATED the content management system used on her website. Not only was it difficult to edit, but it was limited in what it could do. My job was to take the design/content, and make a WordPress theme out of it. Unfortunately her old CMS (Concrete) doesn’t have a way to export blog posts into a format that WordPress recognized…. so we lost a lot of blog posts…. but what we gained made the loss worth it. (At least most of the posts were old and outdated.)

Improvements that I made:

This company teaches baby sign classes around Seattle. One of the problems with the old CMS, was that it was difficult to add new classes to the various places around the site. And once you did get them in, then it was difficult to update them later if you needed to.

I made it so:

Adding a New Class

All classes are in a easy to find list in WP’s backend.

When adding a new class, all she had to do was fill out a form. The class would then populate automatically in the sidebar and on a “classes” page.

She could “archive” a class when it was no longer running. That way when it is ready to run again, she already has all the info created and in place for her to make live.

Incorporated business logos into the listing. The old site attempted to do this, but didn’t get it working.

Can easily add new testimonies to the home page (the old cms wasn’t set up to do so).

Scott and Amy are recent clients that have been referred to me, and have been a JOY to work with.

Some clients are EASY to work with… they know what they want, they already have a understanding of what’s technically doable, and they are open to new ideas and suggestions on how to accomplish things.

They are currently in the process of making a film about a girl in Nepal. An Untouchable Nepali girl receives a “golden opportunity” to break her family’s cycle of poverty, but meets a tragic end. An idealistic American filmmaker investigates. The project has just launched on Kickstarter, in hopes of reaching the funding to finish it.

They came to me with a bought WordPress theme, and a example of a site that they wanted to model after. Rather than copying the site exactly (they were using the same theme), I suggested that we at least change up the site colors. Luckily their theme came with the original design files, so I was easily able to accomplish this and stay within the budget.